Abit AB9

BIOS:

Universal Abit uses a Phoenix AwardBIOS with the AB9 motherboard. The motherboard BIOS features are essentially identical to those found on other recent overclocker-friendly motherboards. Using the uGuru utility the user has the usual assortment of options when it comes to the external clock, DRAM specification, CPU core voltage, DDR2 voltage, MCH voltage, and ICHIO voltage. Abit EQ supports temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring along with FanEQ control.

Unfortunately some compatibility issues with this motherboard and the disk controller had hampered our efforts when attempting to install both Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7 Test 1. Unlike other Intel 965 motherboards with the known Linux workaround of using AHCI and the all-generic-ide argument, this had not worked for the Abit AB9. As a result, we do not have our usual performance results to pass along in this article. However, once this motherboard is operating fully under Linux we will be back with our performance results. We anticipate that this motherboard should have improved support in an upcoming Fedora 7 test or Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Herd release. On paper this motherboard and the AB9 PRO look extremely nice, and from what we had experienced outside of the Linux functionality was great, but we will reserve drawing any conclusions until we have used this motherboard for some time with Linux. Stay tuned!